American Goth Read online

  “Who do you mean, ‘they’? What do you mean, ‘turn’?” She almost missed the side kick and blocked just in time.

  “The Dark, love. They’ll want you to be one of them—you’ve ability, power, and you’re linked to the Circle, the perfect entrance to destroy it. That…they want more than anything. To devour, to destroy the Light.”

  The volley he levied at her was sudden and fast and while she retreated, she held her stance and blocked effectively. “I would never do something like that,” she said, horrified at the thought that anything of that nature existed.

  She managed it, finally, the first blow that got past his guard.

  “Nice,” he told her, admiration evident in his tone. “Maybe you’ll be ready for your weapon sooner, rather than later.”

  *

  Dizzy. I felt dizzy and nauseous as I opened my eyes on the floor of the study. Oh…this…sucks! I thought as I tried to roll over. One moment, I’d been on the Astral, the next—

  “Here.” Cort handed me a glass of milk and a nut-studded brioche. “Shut the systems down.”

  At the first sip, I instantly cleared and after a few ravenous bites, I felt human again.

  “Did you say a weapon?” I asked with real curiosity. I’d thought this was all head stuff, ethics and intentions, a new way, almost, of reading the environment.

  “Yes,” Cort said slowly, “one that will carry, cut, as it were, through worlds.” He sighed heavily. “For now, its function is mostly ceremonial, but there have been times…well, not before you’re ready, anyway.”

  I laughed at that. Less than three weeks ago I had tried to kill myself, had found myself in the strangest, most familiar place I’d ever known, then had woken back to my body to find that the cuts on my wrist had been overlaid with a brand, an ankh melted into my skin. That had been part of the net, the spell Cort had literally cast to keep me alive, because it was the physical proof of my promise and my choice. That ankh now hung from my neck, above the sword pendant I wore.

  “Try me,” I said, now fully revived after eating. “Let’s find out.”

  *

  It had been almost a week since our discussion about a sword, and had my plans not changed within the first few days of our arrival, I would have already been back home, back in the States, packing for freshman orientation at Princeton University.

  Instead, in addition to the new world my uncle carefully and meticulously guided me through, there was the one we actually lived in: Whitkirk, a suburb of Leeds. Everything was strange, from the brick house that seemed older than the country I’d come from, to the way the town was laid out—groups of houses clustered together, their backs facing rolling greens, highways that suddenly became winding roads that ended in small squares, the pub that seemed to be an old factory in the middle of nowhere, then the sudden heavy bustle of Leeds proper as soon as you crossed into it…

  I explored the house itself. The entire first floor was split into three parts: the front half was divided between a sitting room and the kitchen—that took up the front quarter, and while the building was old, the amenities in there were not. I only knew that because Uncle Cort had told me, not because I spent any real time in there. The back half, with a ceiling that rose to the second floor, was filled with carefully placed and arranged items of craft, of large sheets of metal pressed together between huge vises, delicately curved gold wires held with the tiniest of clamps, workbenches with weapons and armor covered in flaking dirt and rust, with brushes, oils, and whatever other mysterious tools would be used to examine and reclaim them.

  The walls themselves were mostly exposed stone painted over in the palest apple green with furring strips fitted and wedged to their height to support the sturdy wooden shelves built onto them. These too were filled with more artifacts and weapons in various states of construction or recovery.

  My uncle’s work had obviously backlogged while he was in the States, taking care of me.

  There was a small, perhaps six foot by six foot black iron oven that sat in the back corner, mounded over the top and sides with brick. I never saw it fired up, but Uncle Cort said he had a bigger one in his shop in town and preferred to use that.

  When I wasn’t watching him and the focused attention he spent on each ancient piece he rescued and carefully restored, I mostly spent time in the study, which took up the entire second floor—books lined every wall except for the one that held the fireplace, and I had a favorite spot, almost a corner really, where the sun would pop in and spend the day over my head. Occasionally, I’d walk up the stairs from the third floor, where all the bedrooms—including mine—were, to exit onto the flat roof and smoke the occasional cigarette while gazing around, either over the town or just up into the sky, watching the clouds or the stars.

  Mostly, though, I played my guitar—or, rather, guitars, one acoustic the other electric, but this was an exercise largely in skill maintenance rather than joy; it reminded me of things and people I didn’t want to think about—or read any of what seemed like a thousand texts on history, lore, religion. I had On A History of Symbols in my hands when Uncle Cort found me in the study.

  “You know…there’s a bit of work I’ve got at the shop in town that I need to get to so I thought, well, I’d like you to work with a tutor during the day while I’m out,” he said, wasting no time when he walked into the room.

  I stared at him in surprise as he set down the small box he’d carried under his arm. “Is this the very nice, polite, British way of telling me I need a babysitter?” I asked and gestured with my arm, revealing the healing lines and brand.

  “If I thought you needed that, you’d have a nurse and wouldn’t need a scholar, now would you?” he asked dryly.

  “I suppose,” I agreed reluctantly.

  He took a slow and heavy breath. “Annie, can you tell me exactly what went through your head that day?” He studied me carefully as he waited for my answer.

  I tried to remember well enough to answer honestly,

  “After the…after the phone call,” I began, then hesitated. I was unprepared for the rush of pure hurt that raced through me as the preceding events played through my mind.

  “After that,” he prompted softly, “what happened?”

  Anger, disbelief, sorrow, rage had all flowed through me before they turned into something…cold…a disconnect…a chill with a voice that made me want to argue with God, Fate, whatever it was that had ordered my life in this way.

  I didn’t know, couldn’t really say, what had led me to go from cutting myself to digging deeper, only that it had made sense, in that same, frozen, logical way, to do so. It had become an imperative that I obeyed. The hurt was…hot, but the anger…was cold. I tried to explain all of that to him as best I could.

  “Thank you for sharing that with me,” he said and laid a warm hand on my shoulder.

  When I blinked up at him through the tears I hadn’t realized had formed, it was to see an echo of them in his eyes as he crouched before me.

  “I don’t want you to think I don’t trust you—I do, I trust you, trust your word. I’d rather you thought of it as a birthday present—a bit late, but a present nonetheless.” He gave me a smile.

  I rubbed my eyes quickly. “What, no fast-moving convertible?” I asked, trying to joke. Other than the roof or the occasional walk around town with Uncle Cort, who shared the history of the area with me, I barely went outside. I wasn’t really interested in wandering about, and I had to keep remembering stupid things, like looking right before left to cross the street. Driving seemed a bit out of reach for the moment, which was too bad, because that was my favorite way to explore as well as to relax.

  Besides, my car, a ’74 Nova, nestled shiny and safe in a garage three thousand miles away.

  “Uh, no. Sorry.” He chuckled. “Would you like roller skates?”

  “I’m being demoted?”

  “Nah,” he laughed with me, “but they’re great for balance, and speaking of…” He reached
into the box he’d set next to him. “This will help.”

  He handed me four black-canvas-covered rectangles, each about two and a half inches wide and six in length. A cotton band sewn firmly along their central lengths extended another few inches beyond the edge on one end, with two d-rings on the other. They weren’t heavy per se, but they had a discernable heft.

  “Sand?” I asked as I curiously shook one.

  “Yes,” he answered as he took it from me, “and you wear it like this.” He wrapped it about my wrist, then showed me how to tie the band through the d-ring.

  “What’s it for?”

  “Strength. Endurance. Speed,” he said simply. “You’ll need to build all of those before we move on to the next phase.”

  “And this will help how?” I asked, as I moved my arm about. The weight was barely noticeable.

  “You’ll wear them, wrists and ankles, starting tomorrow. Take them off to play guitar and to bathe,” he said with a grin. “You don’t have to sleep with them.”

  I shook my head as I carefully removed the weight from my wrist. “I can’t see where such a small weight will do anything.” I couldn’t. I was used to swimming pools and weight rooms, not little things like this that felt like nothing in comparison.

  “You will,” he assured me with another wide smile, “you definitely will.”

  *

  “I’ve someone I’d like you to meet,” Cort said later that afternoon when he reentered the study, and he’d brought someone with him. This, I supposed, was the tutor he’d mentioned, my “birthday present.”

  I marked my page and carefully put the book down to stand as they walked in.

  “This is Elizabeth. Elizabeth MacRae. Elizabeth? This…is our Annie. I’ll leave you to it, then?” he said and excused himself with a small bow. He closed the study doors as he left.

  I stared at the woman before me who stood about five foot three inches, straight steel gray hair pulled back from her face, but loose across her shoulders. Her face seemed familiar as we shook hands, an echo of a memory I couldn’t quite place as her palm met mine, and her eyes, a kindly soft amber, seemed to glow with the sincerest of intentions.

  “You do know, of course, that Cray is a form of MacRae, don’t you?” she said, pronouncing the two vowels of her name discretely and distinctly, as if to illustrate the connection between them. “And that makes us, in fact, distantly related.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, no. I didn’t.”

  “You know nothing about the MacRae?”

  “No.” I eyed her regretfully.

  “Oh, I can see we’ve got a lot to cover,” she said and smiled again. “Let’s begin with the Clan crest, shall we?”

  *

  There was much more to Elizabeth than was obvious to the first-meeting eye, and there was even more to get used to. The first was that she lived with us.

  “I live with Cort when I’m in England,” she told me with a smile as I helped my uncle bring her things in from the car, “but when I’m running away,” and they shared a grin over my head at that, “I’m fond of Aberdeen.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked. I really didn’t know.

  And that was apparently the perfect question with which to open my lessons. The next two weeks found my days filled by Elizabeth teaching me things that ranged wildly—and we did indeed start with the Clan crest and motto: Fortitude.

  I needed fortitude because both Elizabeth’s daily lectures and the now nightly work with Cort focused on the arcane and esoteric, levels of meaning precisely and finely layered. And Cort had been right: the weights, as slight as they may have seemed, did add to the exertion of the physical exercise, but once I got used to wearing them, my body felt light, almost airy, when I removed them.

  Still, I had so much work to do that my guitars received little more than friendly tunings and some quick scale exercises. The good thing about this was that it left me little room for emotional transports of any kind—and for the time being, I preferred it that way.

  I didn’t really know why I had to learn all of these disparate-seeming subjects, but I went along with it—it was all fascinating and it kept my mind busy.

  But there were things I was a bit curious about. The more I worked with Cort, the more…sensitive…I seemed to become to the environment, to people, or at least, to Cort and Elizabeth. There were times it seemed like I could almost physically see a nimbus, the energy field that both of them assured me was a very real thing. It surrounded each of them and there were times it seemed as if faint threads of that nimbus connected them to one another. That was one part of it. The other was…

  “How long have you known my uncle?” I asked Elizabeth one afternoon that had been reserved for free study, time where I picked a specific topic I either liked or wanted to work harder on.

  She glanced up at me from her papers. “We’ve been friends since before you were born. Sometimes, it seems almost before we were born, well, before I was, anyway,” she corrected herself. “He’s a bit older than I am.” She gave me a smile and returned her attention to the work before her.

  I gathered the books and papers I’d scattered on the rug and came to sit next to the desk. Uncle Cort could be funny, and he could be caring and warm, but other than the fact that I was legally his ward until I was twenty-one, as the court-stamped papers signed by my parents said, and my own sketchy childhood memories, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about Cort Peal besides his name, his work, and his seemingly complete knowledge of the Astral. I knew as much of his personality as he let me see, but none of his history, other than he’d known my family forever, it seemed, and was a British national.

  He and Elizabeth had been friends for more than two decades…what would it be like to say something like that? To know someone that long? How well did someone get to know a person after ten years, fifteen, twenty? There was one person I could say had been a really good friend since I was about ten, but I was barely nineteen, and of the friends I’d thought would be lifelong…Nina had been seventeen, wouldn’t get to see—

  “Have you called your friends back in the States since you’ve been here? Your classmates?” she asked and waited patiently for an answer.

  “No.” It came out sharper than I’d intended it, partially due to the surprise that she followed my thoughts so clearly—I wasn’t used to that yet—and I glanced up at her quickly to see if there was more to what she asked. I sensed a friend and could feel there was intent behind her words, nothing malicious or unkind, but a purpose to her question, deeper than idle curiosity or small talk. “There’s no need,” I added, tempering my tone. “There’s only one person I’d speak with and I’m sure she’s…” Triggered automatically by thought, by memory, my heart tightened within me and I couldn’t help it, couldn’t help but reach out with my mind for—

  “Annie, stop,” Elizabeth said quietly and laid her hand over mine. “You mustn’t reach for her, for any of them, like that.”

  I shook my head to in an attempt to clear it and the tears that had started to form. “It’s just that I can’t, I can’t—” I grasped the sword charm that hung from my neck. I took a deep breath, then another while Elizabeth kindly busied herself with the papers and books on the desk, pretending not to see when I reached for a tissue and dabbed at eyes that insisted on filling anyway. “I can’t find her anywhere, not the slightest trace. But when I touch this,” and I showed her the pendant, “when it’s on my skin, it’s as if she were next to me. Nina.”

  Elizabeth gave me a sharp look. “Did she give that to you?”

  I nodded, unable to speak as she leaned over to examine the metal between my fingers. She even held her fingers above it, hovering not more than half an inch away. Her brow creased with her focus. “What a beautiful innocence,” she murmured as she straightened. “You shouldn’t take that off, you know,” she said matter-of-factly and put on her glasses. She began to once more organize the books on the desk.

  My hand clenched tighte
r around the miniature claymore and I could feel the crosspiece of the hilt dig into my fingers.

  “I don’t intend to,” I told her as I tucked it under my shirt so it could warm in its customary spot against my skin.

  “Good.” Her voice was brisk. She peered at me over her half-lenses. “It was a gift given in and with love,” she said gently. “You feel her, because her presence, her intent, is in it. The energy she put into finding and choosing it, the feelings and thoughts she had as she handled it interacts with the molecular structure that forms the metal’s lattice and—” She stopped as she narrowed her focus and examined me.

  I felt like I was about to snap in two because as Elizabeth said the words, I could see it so clearly in my head, could see Nina as if through her own eyes, wandering around with her younger brother during her search, feel the pleased wonder when she finally found it and held it between her fingers, knowing she’d give it to me, considering it the perfect gift. I felt the tremor that had run through her hand when she’d carefully placed it in the box she’d finally wrapped it in, the happy-nervous anticipation when she gave it to me, and that brought a very real memory with it, the memory of the brush of my lips on hers as we stood in the sand by the bay…the kiss in my car after—

  “Go,” Elizabeth said, her voice still kind as I sat there and struggled against the grief that threatened to overflow. “Enough lecture for one day. I do expect to see you for dinner.”

  I nodded my thanks as I exited the room, then used all the discipline I had to force myself to move properly dry-eyed through the hall and up the stairs, down the corridor and into my room. Once the door was closed, I sat on my bed. I couldn’t look at the guitar that stood forlornly in its rack—it made me think of afternoon jam sessions—and I felt like my knees would bend, my back break, my head implode under the black wave of empty that roared above it, threatening to crush me beneath it.